The saskiad, p.31
The Saskiad, page 31
In such a manner does the Adept produce the Elixir of Life. But — ha ha! — Saskia has performed it all backward! And now as she decants the frothing liquid, thick with scum and stinking horribly, into the golden cup she intones, "Gnis Enaj! Dne yht teem!"
Pinching her nose, she holds the cup straight-armed out in front of her and reascends the stairs. In her chamber, in her own bed, the usurper Jane lies sleeping, and Saskia pauses for a moment to watch the dark girl breathe. Then she jabs her in the stomach and she starts awake, wha — ?, her head rising from the pillow, her mouth opening upward, and Saskia tips the golden cup and pours the scalding poison down her throat. Jane splutters and chokes. She scrabbles at her throat, the tendons on her neck standing out, and falls naked out of the bed to the floor. She tries to crawl to the door, but Saskia blocks her. It should take a few seconds. Ah, there. She is going into convulsions. Her back keeps arching backward, farther and farther, impossibly far (that would be the strychnine), and from her mouth billow clouds reeking of bitter almonds (that's the cyanide kicking in). With a last wrenching spasm that draws her lips back from her milk-white teeth into a textbook case of the rictus sardonicus, Jane swallows her tongue, vomits, and dies.
Finally, a little peace and quiet around here.
Saskia strips the sheet from the bed and winds Jane's body in it. Boy, is she heavy! Saskia staggers to the window and throws open the sash. Grunting, she lifts Jane's legs over the sill and rocks her to her waist, at which point her own weight pulls her torso and arms slithering through. Saskia looks out to make sure she cleared the greenhouse.
Chancing to glance up, she notices peasants coming across the fields, carrying torches and pitchforks. She tries to draw her head back in, but her hair, which reaches down to the ground outside, is caught on something. She pulls at it, but like a fouled anchor it will not budge. Someone is climbing it. A face appears over the parapet, a peasant with blackened stumps for teeth, leering and pulling himself along her hair, hand over hand. With all her strength she yanks her head back into the room and brings the sash slashing down like a guillotine blade, cutting her hair off. She runs to warn Tycho, banging on all the doors in the garret to wake the other Adepts and racing down the stone steps to slide — in the nick of time — the oaken beam across the front gate. Tycho is below on the marble slab, and as she bursts in he throws back his coverlet, "What is it?," leaping up. She glimpses for a second his anatomical incorrectness, the Ken-doll smoothness between his legs, but that is simply the Whale in him, and he reaches for his skin hanging on a peg and shrugs it on, leg and leg, centering with his hand the stiff man-thing, pulling the manhood over his sleek head and fastening it with the gold and silver nose.
"We're under attack!" Saskia says.
He grabs his sword off the wall and runs with Saskia up the stairs to look out a loophole. "Christian's men!" he growls.
The enemies of the TAO! Hyperbores has been invaded!
"But — but — but —" Saskia splutters, "we're the ones who were supposed to invade! Weren't we?" Tycho bounds up the stairs, not answering. She runs after him. "Weren't we?" She finds him among the Adepts, furiously directing them to parapets, battlements, barbicans. She tugs at his sleeve. "They couldn't actually win, could they?" He runs farther upward.
She catches him again in the belvedere, where cauldrons of molten lead are bubbling. "Help me with this!" he commands, and the two of them drag a cauldron to one of the windows and tip it forward, pouring the molten lead down the walls. Lauren is scaling the wall, a knife in her teeth, and Saskia directs a river of the molten metal right into her upturned face, scouring her from the wall.
The peasants are falling back! Out across the expanses of snow and ice, Saskia can make out Christian, towering miles high, his leathery wings fanning the winds, beginning to scowl at the failure of his forces.
"Jeppe!" Tycho bellows, leaning over the parapet. "Jeppe, no!"
Down below Jeppe is removing the oaken beam from the front gate and throwing the doors wide. The peasants turn from their headlong flight and pour, cheering, past him as Christian begins to laugh and his wings beat faster and the icy winds mount to a gale, a driving blizzard. The windows of the belvedere blow out, forcing Saskia and Tycho to seek shelter below, and in an instant they are in the thick of the fighting, laying about to right and left. The Adepts have been overwhelmed and slaughtered, the marble slab overturned, the pipes torn from the walls. Tycho and Saskia fight back to back, holding off the murderous horde while inching toward the inner sanctum. Tycho lunges and opens the door, pulls Saskia through, and barricades it behind them.
Safe!
They turn from the door. Jeppe is sitting behind Tycho's desk.
"Oh!" he squeaks, jumping up and grinning in a feces-consuming fashion. "Hee hee! Hello, boss." He does a cartwheel. "I'm sure glad you're OK! Say, did you hear the one about — ?"
Tycho grabs the dwarf by the hair and throws him on the floor. Unbuckling his sword belt, he twists the stunted arms and legs back and cinches them tightly, throws the free end of the belt over the roofbeam, and hauls Jeppe to a convenient height.
"Hey boss, this kind of hurts," Jeppe says. "I mean, I like a little rough stuff, too, everybody does, that's natural, but —"
Tycho swings his bright sword and lops off Jeppe's nose.
"I bead, I lige a liddle rubb stubb doo, dads dadural —"
The sword flashes again. Saskia turns away. She always hated this part. She goes to the window. The Moon is full, and across her face, forming V's like laughter lines, the geese are flying.
She sits up in her bed. Daylight. She has slept in her clothes. It's late. Where is Jane? What day is it?
Thomas has left
The knowledge comes to her in a flash. She looks out the window, toward the dock. Lila is gone.
19
But Saskia was wrong. Seconds after she looked out the window, she heard Thomas's voice, somewhere in the house. Jane had been too angry at Saskia to come upstairs, and had slept on the common room couch. Thomas had taken Lila out of the water early that morning because it was getting too cold for sailing.
Simple, reasonable, obvious. When will Saskia ever learn that life doesn't so neatly follow portents and dreams? Isn't that an indication of what a hopeless child she is?
She gets another chance to learn her lesson four days later — four inconclusive days, during which she sees a bit of both Thomas and Jane, and wants to talk to both of them "about hugely important things, but doesn't — when she wakes in the morning after a night of ordinary dreams she can hardly remember and finds a note tacked to her door: "Saskia — I don't see the point of goodbyes. What could I say that would mean anything? Nothing would help. Forgive me."
20
So that's life! So grow up!
That was Wednesday, approximately a million years ago. Tomorrow will be Monday, and there is a rumor going around that Saskia will be going to school in the morning, but she doesn't set much store by that. It's only a theory. Amazing how her things all sit stupidly around as if nothing ever changes. Her spears would be perfectly happy to fight a Khanate war again, the charts still think they show the way to treasure that was unearthed, worn out, and thrown away years ago.
Twenty words. Twenty-one, if you count "Saskia." But why should she count "Saskia"? She doesn't even know what it means. Why didn't she ever ask Thomas what it meant? She pestered him about everything else under the sun, but never that simple question. She was afraid there was a simple answer. She was afraid he would shrug his shoulders and say, "It doesn't mean anything. I just liked the sound of it." That would put her in the same boat with Lila, who is fated to die every few years, or with Lila, who must periodically have her hull staved in, by Green or by Thomas himself. Although the pattern remained incomplete this time. Lila was still in her cradle in the garage, under a tarp, untouched. Why? But there she goes again, looking for patterns. Grow up!
Lauren was right about one thing: he didn't take Jane with him. At first Jane refused to believe the obvious. Some unforeseen problem, she speculated, some minor glitch, but he would be back to get her, because he'd said, he'd said, blah blah blah. Really, now. His pack was gone, his clothes, everything. Eventually the you-know-what really hit the fan.
But that is how humans react. Arrows snag in the so-called "protective" body hair and are deflected inward, just as a splinter catches in the woof of your sock and is driven up into your foot, whereas Hyperboreans take some Stone, and the slings and harpoons of outrageous fortune merely glance off their sleek backs.
Jane will probably take her hurty feelings out on everybody by telling her parents. Who knows? Maybe she has already told them. Saskia can't imagine what the response would be. Something pyro-technical, no doubt. But what can they do? Thomas is gone, and as far as Jane knows, Lauren never knew. Saskia recognizes now the necessity of the arrangement, this whole charade of secrecy when Lauren actually knew all the time. Thomas's departure would be part of it. He knew the thing with Jane couldn't go on forever, but he also knew he couldn't break it off without her spilling the beans. So he had to leave without notice. He had to go. He had no choice.
Meanwhile, Lauren has been reprising her Post-Thomas role. She stays in her room. Saskia has had to go back to keeping an eye on the crew, who don't seem to quite appreciate what has happened. "Where's Thomas?" they asked at the first breakfast.
"I have no idea."
"That isn't the way Thomas makes pancakes."
"Do I look like Thomas? Sit down and shut up."
Seeing Lauren retreat into her cocoon has reminded Saskia of the First Post-Thomas Age, of things she hasn't thought about in a long time. Of both doors: Lauren's, which Lauren wouldn't open, and
Saskia's, which Lauren wouldn't open, either. She remembers fantasizing about a rescue. Not the usual little-girl fantasy of the white knight coming to carry the princess away. No, when her knight came through the window he threw her a sword, and together they broke down the door and slew the witch, and when they rode away Saskia wasn't behind him on his horse like a spoil of war, she had her own horse, and she could gallop as fast as he could. He was Thomas, of course, her brother-in-chains, her twin. She had been locked in her tower, he in his.
They tore his heart out and handed it to him on a platter. That's why he came out of his tower the way he did, his gaunt face in torment, his hands clutching at the sheet. The blue antenna twitches of the police car, the red cauldron bubbles of the ambulance. Saskia followed him over the gravel, with the dog's howls in her ears, but they pushed her away and lifted him in. In also went the umbilicus and the bottle of ichor, which one of the white-clad men hung on the oar upright by his shoulder.
Who were these men? White and silent, strong. Agents of the TAO? Thomas was in trouble and they whisked him away. Perhaps in the ambulance he threw off the coverlet and sat up on the slab, unhurt. "Good work, men." He would have glanced around. "But where's Saskia?" And the two white-clad men would have looked at each other with dismay surfacing on their loyal but somewhat stupid faces. "Saskia?"
Too late. Lauren had locked her away.
And later, she lied to her. Why did she want Saskia to believe that Raymond had been the guru? To diminish Thomas in her eyes? Fortunately, it never worked. Surely Saskia always knew somewhere deep inside that Thomas was Truth. How else could the realization have come washing over her all by itself, while she stood alone in the driveway at the intersection of Lauren-in-the-Shed, Jane-in-the-Gar-den, and Thomas-on-the-Water?
It explains why, in the photograph of everyone on the porch, he is the only person who is sitting. It explains why Lauren could never tell Saskia what Thomas's commune name was, and it also explains why
Saskia had no commune name, because the commune names came from Truth, and Truth had already named her Saskia. (But what did it mean? What did it mean?) Above all, it explains how and why he left. As Thomas modestly put it, he went a little nuts, but a truer way to say it is, he sat in his tower counting the stars and communing with the crystal spheres until his own crystal vibrated so much it shattered. He was too sensitive.
But why did Thomas back up Lauren in saying that Raymond was the guru? Perhaps, being generous, he did not want to contradict her story and thus show what a liar she was. Or perhaps he knew that if he identified with his old self too much, his crystal might again start vibrating too much.
Did he leave this second time because he felt that he was approaching the shattering point? What must it feel like when the wall of the bubble of consciousness splinters and the sea roars in? Only the great souls know, the seekers who go to the limit, who probe the outer edges of themselves to find out what they are shaped like. Alchemists went crazy all the time, driven by the urge to become perfect, which this sinful world will not allow. The ultimate martyrdom. Saskia has imagined she could endure any torture for the Way. Let them break her body, she has always said. But her mind? Could she bear to go crazy? A frightening thought.
And a more frightening thought: how do you know if you're going crazy? After all, if you are going crazy, then there is no sane "you" to say, "Hey! Aren't I going crazy?" Perhaps Saskia is going crazy right now. She looks around her room and tries to think of a definitive test. How does she know she is in her bed? What if she is really on the marble slab? But she can feel the bed, she can smell it. But that might just mean that she is thoroughly crazy, instead of just marginally crazy.
How does she know she is Saskia? How does she know all the memories of her entire life as "Saskia" are not false? In fact, hasn't she sort of thought before that all her memories are false? What if she has "gone native"? What if she was never meant by the technicians of the TAO to actually believe she was born on Earth? How does she know that she isn't, right now, actually on the marble slab in the cellar of Uraniborg, staring vacantly into space and drooling, and Tycho is turning away with tears in his eyes and saying to another Adept, "I'm afraid we've lost her"?
And the most frightening thought of all: can worrying about whether or not you are going crazy drive you crazy? But how, in fact, do you stop worrying? Because you're worrying about your worrying, aren't you? Isn't this, in fact, proof that she is crazy, that she has been sitting in bed worrying about worrying about worrying? Why can't she be like Mim? There is something sick, isn't there, about Saskia's thinking, questioning, figuring, calculating, plotting, observing. A net with which she chases the world, falling farther and farther behind. Mim just opens her big eyes wide and the whole world slips right in, as easy as you please.
Saskia sweeps the scattered chips of Stone back into the bag and returns it to her drawer. Throwing on her nightgown, she crosses the hall to Mim's room. Dark and quiet. "Mim!" she whispers, shaking her.
Mim burrows deeper.
"Mim!"
She opens her eyes. "What?"
"Come into my room!"
"Why?"
"I had a bad dream."
"I have to bring horsey."
Saskia leads her across the hall. Her adorable nightgown, her adorable little feet. Little? Funny, Mim is taller than Saskia. How long has that been going on? Saskia coaxes Mim into her bed.
"I need giraffey and elephanty." Saskia goes back to Mim's room and finds them in the pile, carries them across. "And alligatory and hippopotamusy." Saskia brings them all, in armloads. Mim disposes them around her, burrows deeper. She sighs twice. She is asleep.
Just like Jane. They fall asleep and leave Saskia behind. It's like having someone die on you. She huddles against Mim and puts her lips to her ear. "Home," she whispers. "Warm kitchen. Kittens."
Cowy and calfy have rolled down to Saskia's side of the bed and she reaches out and rights them, pressing calfy's velcro nose into cowy's udder. There is something so nice about that, it makes her cry.
Wong-king.
The geese are flying across the face of the Moon.
Wong-king, king, wong-king.
A cold wind keens through the broken windows. Saskia turns away and goes down the stairs, her feet crunching on shards of glass, splinters of wood. She parts cobwebs with her hands. "Hello!"
Hello. Hello.
The rooms are empty. Saskia follows a sound but finds only the drip drip of a broken pipe, a pool of scum on the stone floor.
King, king, wong-king.
The geese are flying south, and Tycho has been carried with them, into captivity, into the camp of his enemies. Prague, the heart of Christendom. Exile.
There are no fields of snow and ice in Prague, no limitless sea, no endless night of swarming stars. Only open sewers and bubonic plague. Tycho wakes one morning to the gray light and realizes he can no longer take his skin off. Was he ever a whale? Was he the Grandmaster? The low skies press down on him, suffocating him like the skin that he cannot remove. Where are his instruments? Where are his Adepts? "I am here," Saskia says. She can no longer take her skin off, either. She did this for him, the ultimate martyrdom, to be by him in his exile.
He is at table with his guests. "More coffee!" he shouts, pounding the table with his fist. Saskia prefers to see him this way, full of life, instead of moping around and dreaming of his lost island. She brings in the brimming tankards and sets them down, leaning far over the table so that the Captain can see down her laced bodice.
"You're looking very decolletee today, my dear," he says gallantly, blushing.
"Thank you, sar." Marco pinches her. "Oh, sar!"
"I'll say this, you're doing fairly well, boys " Tycho is conceding. "But it won't be long now. Drink up!"
The men clank tankards and chugalug. Tycho wipes his foaming mouth with his sleeve. "You see, the more you consume the more you secrete. Isn't that right, Saskia?"
"Aye aye, sar."
"But that's only true for humans," Odysseus points out.
"We'll see who's human! Bring in a double portion, Saskia."
When she returns, groaning under the weight of all that coffee, Tycho is saying, "Now, for example, I don't feel any pressure at all. Not a thing! I feel as empty as if I'd just taken a fine long piss, I mean one of those drumming streams that really foam up the bowl —" The Captain's face turns scarlet. A pool is spreading beneath his chair. "Oops! There goes the first one!" Tycho laughs.
